The 2004 report that Wells Fargo chose to ignore

Wells Fargo has been in lawmakers' crosshairs since acknowledging previous year that some of its employees created as many as 2 million fake accounts - from credit cards to checking accounts - to meet sales goals.

The 110-page report released Monday was prepared by the Shearman & Sterling law firm. Structurally, the bank was too decentralized, with department heads like Tolstedt given the mantra of "run it like you own it" and given broad authority to shake off questions from superiors, subordinates or peers. These included complaints by Wells Fargo managers that employees were being pressured to meet unrealistic sales goals and that an "numerous" accounts were not being funded, primarily because customers did not know had been set up. Last month, Mack restructured the community bank's leadership.

Sloan promised during the conference call on Monday that Wells Fargo will "learn from these mistakes that are right there in black-and-white in this exhaustive board report".

And in fact, the report notes, the actual number of people who had been fired or resigned as a result of investigations was closer to 2,600 at that time.

The report said that "on April 7, 2017.it was determined that the finding made by the Board on September 25, 2016, that cause existed for terminating Tolstedt's employment was appropriate, with resulting forfeiture of her outstanding stock options awards with a current intrinsic value of approximately $47.3 million".

Rather than admitting the flaws in the sales model, community banking head Carrie Tolstedt and others found it "convenient instead to blame the problem of low quality and unauthorized accounts and other employee misconduct on individual wrongdoers and poor management in the field", the report found.

The report said management did not identify sales practices as a "noteworthy risk" to the board until 2014, after a 2013 Los Angeles Times story on the issue.

The report reveals that the Wells Fargo board at the time was asleep and lazy and didn't heed warnings from down the line staff and ignored reports of the fake accounts scam well before they reached the desks of regulators in California and Washington.

Asked Monday if he should resign, Wells Fargo Chairman Stephen Sanger, who has been on the bank's board since 2003, defended the board's actions, saying it has acted properly since the scandal came to light. As president and chief operating officer, he became Tolstedt's immediate supervisor in November 2015.

Lisa Stevens: The regional manager was a "vocal advocate" within the community bank for changing sales goals and the behavior they encouraged, according to the report. The investigators said Stumpf protected Tolstedt.

Part of what led to Stumpf's immediate retirement likely was his downplaying to Congress and to the board the enormity of the fraudulent account scandal.

"His reaction invariably was that a few bad employees were causing issues. he was too late and too slow to call for inspection or critical challenge to (Wells') basic business model", the board said. Last week, influential proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services urged shareholders to vote against the election of 12 of the 15 board members at the upcoming annual meeting, including Sanger. Shareholders soon have a chance to make that clear.

However, Wells Fargo's cross-selling mania went back at least a decade - possibly as far back as 1998, Public Citizen research shows. As for firing Tolstedt, though, he said he never even considered it.

Going forward, Ellison says he'd like to have more hearings to explore the issue and uncover more information, though that could be a tough lift for the House's minority party after the shock of the scandal has faded. Data from a NY media tracking firm showed Wells Fargo advertising expenditures increasing by 115 percent to $183.8 million in the first two months of 2016 compared to the year before.